Dark Days

by ALEXANDER WALKER, Evening Standard

In 1956, a documentary director named Lionel Rogosin, seldom celebrated now, woke up the film-going world's conscience with a piece of ciné-vérité called On the Bowery: an exposé of New York's winos and Skid Row derelicts so real and close up you could nearly smell as well as hear them.

It was one of the earliest of its genre to have folk speak dead straight to camera. It won the documentary Grand Prize at Venice that year. Basil Wright, in Sight and Sound, called it 'neither a propaganda film, nor a piece of reportage [but] a film made from the inside'.

I quote this comment of 45 years ago because it can't be bettered as a description of what Marc Singer has achieved in Dark Days. He has gone literally from the mean streets to the 'lower depths' of NY: to the Amtrak train tunnel under Manhattan that was 'home' for more than 20 years to a community of homeless people.

Singer lived among them for two years, crafting their own talents to help him photograph, produce and comment on their condition. It's a real dark film, but the amazing thing is the lightness of heart that survives in people who should have passed the point of no return. To be homeless is not necessarily to be helpless.

Unlike Rogosin's Bowery bums, these subterraneans have created a lively state of communal togetherness uniting them more self-reliantly than many an ethnic ghetto 'up top'. They are street-smart and articulate.

They are mostly black and all are male. Their language - tongue and body - suggests schooldays long ago and possibly of brief duration, but also of lessons well learned. They are natural monologuists. They comment on their condition with unembittered fluency laced with laconic irony. A guy who once went to a detox clinic says he emerged with a new addiction - a fondness for 'eggplant Parmesan' on its menu.

When they prepare supper out of scraps, it is with a connoisseur's care: skimmed milk or buttermilk for the scrambled eggs?

Amid detritus, there is food for thought: one guy ponders philosophically on the natural wonder of a single rat producing 12 offspring, yet eating eight of them - 'So how come there are so many rats?'

Literally down in the dumps, they've created a house-proud refuge that's a reproach to the homeless of other cities - not least in our own sleazy West End - who sully the public sidewalks in huddled helplessness.

They purloin lighting and TV from the city's power lines and construct a shantytown of cosy cabins, carpeted, snug enough for dogs to doze as if on the mat in a suburban home, though frail enough to shake as Penn Station's high-speed trains roar past. Best of all, there's a 'feel good' surprise ending: not one imposed on grimy reality, but brought about by benign intercession.

Everyone is found a place in a housing project. This 'miracle' could do with a bit more civic explanation: it seems a mite too sunny to be entirely true. All the same, the end shot is infinitely touching: a black man flopping down contentedly on his own bed. It is the last thing you see, and the last you expected to see.